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“Then why do you—?”

“Because it’s pointless to think it’s going to be okay. Having hope right now doesn’t help us. We’ve got to survive and that’s it. And we for sure don’t need to fight about it.”

Kodie crossed her arms over her chest in what would have been a huff in the old world. Now, driving through our neighborhood to check on some little girl we didn’t know, it wasn’t a huff. It was just an end to a discussion that served no purpose.

Reasons didn’t matter. We were still here and the world howled with wind and emptiness. Trees bent over our car in the gusts and yellow live oak leaves shimmered down around us in a butterfly swarm. We drove through them at a funereal pace. I looked ahead at this October scene and wondered if there was anything more haunted than an empty backstreet without sidewalks, showering leaves, gutters packing with autumn’s debris.Kodie asked, “Why are you driving so slowly?”

We left the Dollar Tree in a hurry but now, as we approached, my legs got heavy and my head swam. I remember time and space warping out of tune in those moments.

“I don’t know. I feel like we’re about to see something that’s going to make all that’s changed change just as radically again. I’m in no hurry to see it.”

I thought about the long walk down the aisle to view my grandmother’s body lying in an open coffin in front of the offertory. This was last year. I felt like a child of single-digit age, scared and unsure, the dreamlike quality of the moment dizzying.

Me and Ma Maw—Lucille to the world, my mom’s mother—we were close. She’d lived in Round Rock, so I saw her a lot. She liked me to serenade her with my trombone, especially when I played The Saints. Boy, I could play that song. But she may have liked my stories and poems even more. Other than Mr. E, she’s the only one I ever read them to. When I did, she’d say “oh”—and her eyes would be moist, her nose reddening and sniffling.

I never had the chance to read The Late Bloomers[6] to her, though. The one that wrote itself. Kind of like this, but that was, um, fiction. Glad I didn’t write it before she was gone, actually. This was a story I wrote this past summer, a story based on vivid, recurring dreams of a dry June. We’ll get to that.

Anyway, Martin, never deigning to get out of the car, would drop me off at Grandma Lucille’s house and she’d cook for me. We’d watch TV and laugh and she’d always tell me how strong a person I was and that I’d be okay even though that man (referring to my father) wasn’t there for me. Seeing her shrunken body lying on that puffed satin, her face darkened and turning inward, the brittle fingers of her hands clasped on her chest, I was so stunned and sick that I couldn’t move. Mom had to urge me away with a gentle tug on my elbow.

That feeling came again under the faux butterflies of autumn. The street darkened with the shade of overhanging trees, forming a tunnel.

But for the passive act of driving, I couldn’t move.

I was locked inside myself. Kodie touched my hand, like my mother did my elbow at the casket, and said under her breath, “I know.”

“You feel it too?” I managed to get out.

She nodded and gulped. “I feel sick. Here we are being pulled to this one little girl just because we randomly saw her dad die.”

“Random. I wonder.”

She let go of my hand and took one of those deep cleansing breaths one takes when they’re next to speak to a large crowd. In my peripheral vision I saw that her hand shook before she swooped it through her hair.

“Tell me we should just turn around?” I asked when we pulled up to the house matching the address, my brakes whining. “Please?”

The house recessed back into a lot dark with shade. Pecans moldered in the yard, on the sidewalk and the metal roof.

I turned off the engine and we sat. The quiet growing around us felt alive and stifling. It forced me out of the car for breath.

Kodie got out and closed her door softly using two hands like she probably did as a high schooler when she got home post-curfew after mugging down with some dude. A twinge of jealousy came with that thought. Just a twinge, because as we walked toward the house, we heard voices. Kodie and I looked at each other with wide eyes. She accidentally popped a pecan under her boot. The small firework sound of it startled us.

The voices stopped. We froze. I felt watched.

So quiet. I almost preferred seeing the Hollywood zombie horde come tear-assing around the corner in high dudgeon at the sound of that crushed pecan. At least that was something we could see. We could run, repel them, something. But this quiet creep, this world devoid and howling.

Not knowing is the worst of fears.

It was then that I felt I was part of an unspooling narrative, one over which I had no control. The world had taken a strange turn on its axis and we’d become game pieces on a board.

The voices started up again and they sounded in unison, like a classroom of pupils reciting a lesson, repeating it. We tiptoed around the mines of blackened nuts along the sidewalk.

I clenched Kodie’s hand for us to stop. I whispered into her ear, “Why’d you get that bat from under your bed?”

She carefully stepped to me and whispered, “These kids up the street I babysit, brother Eric and sister Sarah Jane, seven and five. They were standing in my yard looking in at me through the window. As I startled awake and sat up in bed this morning, they just stood out there still as statues, watching me, still wearing their pajamas.”

Though we hadn’t taken a step, the voices came louder. Something repeated.

Something chanted.

We peered through the windows. Nobody in the front room. I went to the door and opened it. Kodie had me by the hand. Their voices were many and metronomic. We made our way through the house, trying to land our footfalls in a heel-toe that would’ve been quiet but for the groan of the wooden floors.

We got to the hall leading to a back bedroom. The door stood open. A single bed sat shoved in the corner. One of the two screened windows was open a foot.

In the middle of the room in a perfect circle sat ten, twelve children, crisscross applesauce, knee to knee, boys and girls.

And now they all turned their heads to us in unison and now we could hear what they were saying. I felt my heart lose its rhythm and my face flush with the effort of getting it back. What they said in synchronicity was, “They leap from high places with smiles on their faces.”

They locked their eyes onto ours and their moving mouths and jaws articulated it succinctly—they leap from high places with smiles on their faces, their tongues flittering and tripping on milk teeth soon to fall out of their heads.

I had heard these words before. In a summerdream? Graffiti? It was engrafted into my mind, but I couldn’t place it.

They recited this several more times as we stood there unmoving. I was hardly aware of Kodie though she gripped my hand. Then they stopped and that new-world silence descended. The girl matching the photograph stood up. Rebecca’s eyes didn’t blink. They shone like blue moons. She wore a red knee-length dress tied around her middle with a wide band of white. She was peppermint with enormous icy-blue eyes and she asked coy and sweet, “Did you see my daddy?” A prideful raise of her chin.

Kodie and I nodded.

“He told you to come find me?”

We nodded. “He asked,” I croaked, “he asked us to.”

The little girl shook her head several times. Her hair fanned out and the curls in it rolled. “Well, you’re tooooo late.” It was an adorable laugh line from a sitcom, the baby of the family showing some sass. The laugh track should have boomed here. But nobody moved beyond the autonomic movement of diaphragms, an eye blink here and there. Each little face held the grimness of the cancer ward. The light from between dancing tree limbs moved on their faces. A pecan knocked on the roof and rolled.

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6

A copy of this document is attached as Exhibit E.